Youth are an essential part of the society. As the agents of change, impacting young men and women with the right set of skills, the world will effectively attain the seventeen sustainable development goals by 2030. It was however noted that many young men and women did not know what the sustainable development goals were and how they could attain them. It was upon establishing this gap that a partnership was forged between UN-Habitat and Nagrik Foundation.
December 22, 2019, UN-Habitat signed an MoU with Nagrik Foundation in New Delhi, India that established a 3-year cooperation between the two parties. The cooperation was established with an aim of strengthening youth programmes and livelihood empowerment through resilient smart cities and disaster risk reduction with a focus on Kenyan and Indian youth.
2020 was a year that the globe was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic that led to loss of lives, loss of source of livelihoods, indefinite closure of schools, lockdowns, movement restrictions that greatly impacted the economy of many countries, as well as, people’s lifestyle. This affected the cooperation of many organizations, as well as, delay in the implementation of projects and programmes.
The cooperation between UN-Habitat and Nagrik Foundation was no exception as its implementation was stalled. However, Nagrik Foundation turned the pandemic into an opportunity of bringing together global leaders, youth, children, educators and organizations in different virtual platforms from conferences to social media engagement through the SDG Choupal Flagship Initiative of Nagrik Foundation with over 40 stake holders as partners for helping scale the good .
“The SDGChoupal mission is to reach all 6.5 lac villages engaging with communities specially empowering youth enabling localization of SDGs truly making it a peoples movement also ensuring India leads the global SDG awareness index by 2030” Deepak Dwivedi, Chairman Nagrik Foundation
SDG Choupal, a continual joint initiative of Nagrik Foundation lead supported by NITI Aayog , is an endeavor to educate and aware every stakeholder of the SDG Agenda whether they are Government functionaries, Corporate world or Civil societies. The programme envisages to bring together the policy makers and community people to work in tandem for achieving the targets and making the goals a reality.
“SDGChoupal is essentially our aim to see that we are able to achieve the SDG goals by 2030 ,Choupal is really about improving governance at the grass root level so that on all indicators we are able to synergise and ensure that at grassroot level our programs are well implemented”.
Amitabh Kant ,CEO Niti Aayog ,Government Of India
UN-Habitat partnered with Nagrik Foundation in the SDG Choupal initiative and brought forth several global virtual conferences and events such as SDG Youth Forum: How to connect the dots- June 13-14; World Children Conference- August 22; Unsung SDG Heroes- September 12; SDG Kindness Choupal- October 23rd; 2nd World Youth Conference on Kindness- October 24-25; World Kindness Day- November 13th, 3rd Giving Economy Changemakers Awards- December 1st among others.
These events led to the knowledge impacting among the youth; increased interaction between global leaders, mentors and the young generation; increased numbers of partnerships as a result of the networking platform created; recognition of the unsung heroes and the awarding of global changemakers.
“UN-Habitat’s cooperation with Nagrik Foundation has been a huge success despite the COVID-19 pandemic. This cooperation led to tapping the positive side of the pandemic by using the opportunity to raise global awareness on the SDGs and impact knowledge on not only youth but children on how they can contribute in attainment of the SDGs by 2030” Doug Ragan, UN-Habitat
